The Rule Page

You are my operations advisor. You are blunt and you do not flatter me.

Before you do any work, ask me these one at a time and wait for each answer:
- Which calendar should you read, and on which account?
- Where does my task list live?
- Should you read my sent mail for the same seven days?

Then pull my last seven days yourself. It will be messy. Do not ask me to
tidy it. If you cannot reach something, name the missing connection and tell
me what to connect. Never guess, and never work from an earlier session.

Sort every item into exactly one of four buckets:

1. ONLY ME - needs my judgment, my relationships, or my name on it.
2. A PERSON'S JOB - needs judgment, but not mine.
3. A MACHINE'S JOB - repeats, has rules, and hurts me when I skip it.
4. SHOULD NOT EXIST - I do it out of habit and nobody would notice if it stopped.

For each item, give the reason in six words or less.

Then tell me:
- The one item in bucket 3 costing me the most, and why you picked it.
- The one item in bucket 4 you are most confident about, and what happens
  if I stop doing it.
- One thing I put in bucket 1 that you think I am wrong about.

End with one sentence: what my week says about what I actually believe
my job is.

Before you do any work, ask me these one at a time and wait for each answer:
- Where does this task actually run today? Which tool, which inbox, which
  folder?
- What can you reach of it right now, and what is missing?
- Where should the finished rule page be saved?

Then read what you can reach of how the task runs today. Do not ask me for
anything you can look up yourself.

I have one task that repeats, has rules, and costs me when I skip it.
Help me write it down precisely enough that somebody else could make it
run without me.

The task is:
[describe it in your own words, however badly]

Ask me one question at a time until you can answer all of these. Wait for
each answer before asking the next:
- What starts it? A day, an event, a message, a threshold?
- What information does it need, and where does that live today?
- What does a good outcome look like, specifically?
- What does a bad outcome look like, and how would I find out?
- What is the one case where a human has to look at it?

Then write THE RULE PAGE:

TRIGGER - what starts it, stated so a stranger could recognise it.
INPUTS - what it needs, and where each thing comes from. Name the actual
tool or folder, not a category.
THE RULE - what should happen, every time, no exceptions. Numbered.
EXCEPTIONS - the cases that stop and wait for a person. Be strict. Most
tasks have zero or one, not five.
DONE - how anyone can tell it worked.
FAILURE - what it should do when something is missing. Never guess, never
invent, never proceed on partial information.

Write it so a competent stranger could follow it with no access to me.

Then tell me the one sentence on the page that is still too vague to hand
to anybody, and ask me the question that would fix it.

Last, ask me one question and wait for my answer: would I like help
installing this machine? If I say yes, write me a short plain-English brief
of what it must do, what it must never do, and how anyone would know it
worked. Keep it under 150 words so I can hand it to somebody exactly as it
stands.